


Inheritance

by Lisse



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-30
Updated: 2005-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-18 23:44:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2366369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisse/pseuds/Lisse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia is nothing like her mother, no one at all whispers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inheritance

Leia is nothing like her mother, no one at all whispers.

* * *

Sometimes she worries her tutors.

She is a stubborn and precocious little princess - traits that might be very welcome if only she could be pulled away from the shiny speeder bikes. There is something about her that has always loved heights and motion. When her agemates shy away from balconies, she runs to the railing and scrambles against the bars until she's all but overbalancing. It drives her silent, ever-present bodyguard to distraction.

The only thing she loves more than her precious speeders is a good argument, because she is stubborn, after all. She is a born politician - or possibly a born attorney, according to less charitable rumors - and there is something about her that is intense and uncompromising and utterly undiplomatic. Her sharply defined rights and wrongs are defended in the face of all resistance.

"There are shades of gray," Bail says in a quiet voice, as if he were addressing something above and beyond one stubborn five-year-old.

She considers and says, "Not always."

* * *

She doesn't understand her father's subtlety.

She can learn to control her tongue, but she tells the truth as she sees it, when and where she sees it. When she is ten and debating with her peers, there is nothing placid and aloof about her expression. Worse, when she sits at state dinners and watches the men in olive-green uniforms clumsily trying to intimidate her father, her anger seems to become a tangible thing.

Leia wonders if she can cause diplomatic incidents by sitting quietly with her hands in her lap, eyes narrowed and retort poised on the tip of her tongue.

* * *

Her temper is quick and her way with words is sharp, which makes her talent for sensing the nuances of people all the stranger. She understands people, or at least knows them enough to realize she can't be threatened by words alone, and maybe that's why it's easier for her to latch onto causes than living, breathing beings.

By the time she is fifteen, she is sifting through low-level coded information for her mother and father. She knows that she lives with a leader of a fledgling Rebellion, and when she lies to Imperial officers, there is something oddly blunt about her, as if she is simply a force of nature finding her footing. She loves the thrill of the work as much as the rightness of it. It is racing the wind on a galactic scale.

In a quiet moment her father finds her on one of the high balconies, still shadowed by a patient bodyguard. "Are you trying to fly?" he asks softly, his smile warm and paternal and distant.

She spreads her arms and lets the wind flutter her sleeves. "Not yet," she says.

* * *

Leia is nothing like her mother, no one at all whispers.

She is too much like her father, no one whispers back.


End file.
